“Cleanliness is almost as bad as godliness.” — Samuel Butler
Author: Greg Ross
Embarrassing Duels
In June 1836, congressmen Daniel Jenifer of Maryland and Jesse A. Bynum of North Carolina met on the dueling ground in Bladensburg, Md. Jenifer had denounced Andrew Jackson’s party and refused to retract his statement. The two men stood 10 feet apart, both fired six times, and, amazingly, both missed six times. They called it a draw.
In The Field of Honor, his 1883 history of dueling, Benjamin Cummings Truman records a strange contest between Capt. Raoul de Vere and Col. Barbier-Dufai, of Paris. The two agreed to settle a quarrel by entering a coach with daggers in their right hands and with their left arms tied, and fighting while the coach was driven twice around the Place du Carousel. Both died.
Even stranger: A Spaniard and a German both loved the daughter of Maximilian II, but the emperor did not want to risk their lives in a conventional duel. Instead he promised the girl’s hand to whichever man could wrestle his opponent into a bag.
“The two gentlemen expressed their willingness to engage in even so ridiculous a contest for so superior a prize, and fought in the presence of the whole court, the contest lasting more than an hour, the Spaniard finally yielding, having been put fairly into the bag by the German, Baron Eberhard, who took it and its Castilian contents upon his back, and very gallantly laid them at the feet of the young lady, to whom he was married the following day. This is the only duel or tournament of the kind on record.”
See En Garde!
First to Market
In March 1964, David Threlfall sent a unique request to bookmaker William Hill: “I’d like to bet £10 that a man will set foot on the surface of the moon before the first of January 1970.”
He’d heard President Kennedy’s 1961 address challenging the United States to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, and “I thought if a bookmaker was prepared to offer reasonable odds it would be a commonsense bet.”
The bookmaker disagreed and put the odds at 1,000 to 1. Threlfall accepted, and the bet was placed on April 10.
As the Apollo program advanced, the odds began to drop, and people began to offer Threlfall thousands of pounds for his betting slip. He held on to it, though, and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, he received the reward for his forethought — a check for £10,000.
Side Business
Here’s proof that one leg of a triangle always equals the sum of the other two.
ABC is our triangle. Extend it make a parallelogram, as shown, and divide the parallelogram into a grid. Obviously,
AB + BC = (AG + HJ + KL + MN) + (GH + JK + LM + NC).
Now let the grid grow increasingly fine: Instead of dividing the parallelogram into a 4×4 grid, make it 5×5, then 6×6, and so on. With each iteration, the stairstep figure described above will approximate AC more closely, and yet its total length will always equal AB + BC. Thus, at the limit, AB + BC = AC. Where is the error?
(From Henry Dudeney’s Canterbury Puzzles, via W.W. Rouse Ball’s Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 1892.)
Next Stop
A woman proceeding by the elevated railroad, by the side of the Niagara Falls, asked the engine-driver, ‘If the rope broke, where she would go to?’ The driver told her that ‘If one broke they would have the other one to hold them.’ The woman then said, ‘Well, driver, if that broke, where should I go to?’ ‘Well,’ said the driver, ‘it just depends upon what sort of a life you have led.’
— Tit-Bits From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World, Dec. 3, 1881
The 65th Square
By Eric Angelini, Europe Echecs, 1990.
White adds one square at the edge of the board and then mates in two.
Coming and Going
ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL is a word-level palindrome.
So is the witches’ chant FAIR IS FOUL, AND FOUL IS FAIR in Macbeth.
Goliath Bound
Irritated with Britain’s repeated “paper blockades” of the American coast, privateer Thomas Boyle slipped into the English Channel in 1814 and proclaimed a one-ship blockade of the entire United Kingdom:
Whereas it has become customary with the Admirals of Great Britain, commanding small forces on the coast of the United States, particularly Sir John Borlaise Warren and Sir Alexander Cochrane, to declare all the coast of the United States in a state of strict and rigorous blockade, without possessing the power to justify such a declaration, or stationing an adequate force to maintain said blockade, I do therefore, by virtue of the power and authority in me vested (possessing sufficient force) declare all the ports, harbors, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands, and seacoast of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in a state of strict and rigorous blockade. And I do further declare, that I consider the force under my command adequate to maintain strictly, rigorously, and effectually, the said blockade. And I do hereby require the respective officers, whether captains, commanders, or commanding officers, under my command, employed or to be employed on the coasts of England, Ireland, and Scotland, to pay strict attention to the execution of this my proclamation. And I do hereby caution and forbid the ships and vessels of all and every nation, in amity and peace with the United States, from entering or attempting to enter, or from coming or attempting to come out of any of the said ports, bays, creeks, rivers, inlets, outlets, islands, or seacoasts, under any pretence whatsoever. And that no person may plead ignorance of this my proclamation, I have ordered the same to be made public in England.
The proclamation was posted in Lloyd’s Coffee House in London — and, back home, won his ship the title “The Pride of Baltimore.”
The Gentle Cynic
More maxims of Rochefoucauld:
- “Before we passionately wish for anything, we should examine into the happiness of its possessor.”
- “Were we perfectly acquainted with any object, we should never passionately desire it.”
- “It is easier to appear worthy of the employments we are not possessed of, than of those we are.”
- “Those who endeavor to imitate us we like much better than those who endeavor to equal us. Imitation is a sign of esteem but competition of envy.”
- “We are often more agreeable through our faults than through our good qualities.”
- “We easily excuse in our friends those faults that do not affect us.”
- “None are either so happy or so unhappy as they imagine.”
- “Censorious as the world is, it oftener does favor to false merit than injustice to true.”
- “Absence destroys small passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes tapers, and kindles fires.”
- “We never desire ardently what we desire rationally.”
- “Our self-love bears with less patience the condemnation of our taste than of our opinion.”
And “Why have we memory sufficient to retain the minutest circumstances that have happened to us; and yet not enough to remember how often we have related them to the same person?”
Partly Cloudy
But how are we to figure the change from ‘undecided’ to ‘true’? Is it sudden or gradual? At what moment does the statement ‘it will rain tomorrow’ begin to be true? When the first drop falls to the ground? And supposing that it will not rain, when will the statement begin to be false? Just at the end of the day, 12 p.m. sharp? … We wouldn’t know how to answer these questions; this is due not to any particular ignorance or stupidity on our part but to the fact that something has gone wrong with the way the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ are applied here.
— F. Waismann, “How I See Philosophy,” in H.D. Lewis, ed., Contemporary British Philosophy, 1956